Brazilian doctor performs C-section on woman with a phantom pregnancy

This month an unnamed 37-year-old woman showed up at a women’s clinic outside Rio de Janeiro with a melon-size belly and signs of labor, according to the Daily Mail. She was groaning and writhing in pain. The woman carried proof of prenatal treatment that indicated she was 41 weeks pregnant. She had seen a midwife throughout her pregnancy.

The clinic’s medical team admitted the woman and assumed she was in labor so they checked for a fetal heartbeat—but there was none. They only heard silence.

The doctors assumed the baby was in peril so they immediately performed a cesarean section without performing an ultrasound.

Doctors were shocked when they cut open the “pregnant” woman’s abdomen and didn’t find a baby.

The woman’s situation is being identified as a phantom or false pregnancy or what’s known as pseudocyesis in the medical world.

In extreme, rare cases, some women wholeheartedly believe that they’re pregnant when they’re not carrying a child. Pseudocyesis patients aren’t intentionally trying to trick people into thinking they’re pregnant; these women truly believe they’re with child. They present real symptoms that fool their partners and even the most experienced doctors. These women gain weight, stop menstruating, feel nauseous, crave foods and even feel fetal movement in their stomachs. In even rarer cases, patients test positive in pregnancy tests.

The little research that’s been done around pseudocyesis shows that psychology and hormones play a big role in phantom pregnancies. The medical field seems to believe that women who desperately want to have a child but haven’t been able to are likely at the highest risk for having a phantom pregnancy. Women who’ve had infertility issues and miscarriages are more susceptible. Researchers have also studied cases where a woman has developed a false pregnancy while closely following along with a friend or family’s members pregnancy.

Phantom pregnancies are nothing new and recorded cases go back as far as 300 B.C. when Hippocrates wrote about 12 women suffering from the disorder. Some historians believe the English queen Mary Tudor, aka “Bloody Mary,” suffered from pseudocyesis as she desperately wanted to produce an heir. Today, phantom pregnancies have made their way into pop culture with the television series Glee using a false pregnancy as a plot device.

With this most recent case in Brazil, the woman’s husband told Brazil’s Globo G1 website that his wife claimed to have been pregnant once before and said she lost the child. But the husband never saw a death certificate. Was it another phantom pregnancy?